2 Views Of A Horror

Jews In U.s., Israel Split Over Holocaust Lesson

May 09, 1993|By Tom Hundley. and Tom Hundley is the Tribune's Middle East correspondent.

AUSCHWITZ, Poland — Shira Vickar, a University of Illinois junior, was unsettled by the piles of suitcases and trunks, all with addresses neatly handlettered by Jews who desperately believed the Nazis would let them walk out of the death camps and return to their lives.

As Vickar stood before the display and tried to make sense of Auschwitz, she was approached by a young Israeli who asked where she lived.

"I told him I was from America and he said, `I don't understand you. I don't understand how you can be a Jew and not live in Israel.'

"I felt defensive," she admitted. "I tried to tell him that there's a role for Jews outside Israel, but now I don't know what to think."

The brief encounter encapsulates the complex and often uneasy relationship with the Holocaust that simultaneously binds and divides American and Israeli Jews.

For both, the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews by the Nazis has become the defining experience of contemporary Judaism, but as the actual events recede into history, interpretation of the Holocaust has become entangled in a thicket of ideology, money, power politics and the markedly divergent national experiences of Jews in the U.S. and Israel.

In recent weeks, the debate has come into sharp focus with the opening of major new Holocaust museums in Washington and Los Angeles, and with ceremonies in the U.S., Poland and Israel marking the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

The dispute is simple: Who owns the legacy of the Holocaust? Who shall shape and translate its meaning for future generations?

"The American view says the Holocaust happened because of racism; Israelis say it happened because of powerlessness," explained Michael Oren, director of the American Jewish Committee's Israel office.

"Israelis say a strong Jewish state is the only answer to the Holocaust. American Jewry tends toward the view that awareness and tolerance are the lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust."

Critics of the American perspective say the emphasis on the universal lessons of the Holocaust overlooks the uniquely Jewish character of the catastrophe; those who criticize the Israeli approach say that focusing exclusively on Jewish suffering creates a narrow, "Jews against the world" mentality.

Shira Vickar and about 300 other high school and college students, most of them Americans, found themselves cast into the midst of the highly charged debate last month when they participated in the annual March of the Living, an Israeli-based tour of one of several such pilgrimages to Nazi death camps in Poland.

Last year, the March of the Living drew more than 5,000 participants. This year's tour, kept smaller by design, became a lighting rod for controversy when Israeli Education Minister Shulamit Aloni, the outspoken leader of the left-wing Meretz Party, complained that the death camp pilgrimages-including ones sponsored by her own ministry-were turning students into aggressive, flag-waving xenophobes.

Young Jews, she said, "march with unfurled flags, as if they've come to conquer Poland."

Others found fault with the tours for being heavy on shock value and emotionalism while skimping on the moral and intellectual lessons of the Holocaust.

Jerusalem's Hebrew University joined the fray by threatening disciplinary action against students who skipped classes to go to Poland. Usually about 150 students would have been expected to make the trip; this year only 30 signed up.

Evidence that the tours promote a xenophobic outlook is, at best, mixed. Studies have shown that some Israeli students return from Poland with a heightened sense of mistrust for all non-Jews while equal numbers come home with a new appreciation for the humanity of Israel's closest enemies and neighbors, the Palestinians.

Michael Berl, an energetic rabbi who emigrated from America to Israel eight years ago, is the moving force behind March of the Living, which has been conducting tours since 1988.

"We take a confrontational approach to the Holocaust," he explained. "There's no brainwashing, there's no political line. The kids come to the sites and they see with their own eyes."

Students who pay the $1,250 fee to go on the March of the Living attend five lectures and a day of orientation before they get to Poland. A professional staff that includes historians, social workers, psychologists and Holocaust survivors guides the tour.

Despite Berl's disavowal, the March of the Living approaches the Holocaust from a decidedly Israeli point of view-that is, Jews are surrounded by enemies and Israel is the only safe place.

The participants see or learn almost nothing of Poland except as the venue for the destruction of European Jewry.

On the evening before the students visited Auschwitz, they listened to a high-voltage sermon by Shlomo Riskin, a charismatic American rabbi who now leads a congregation in the West Bank settlement of Efrat.